Friday, October 5, 2012

Last Pascha, I strongly urged you to read this sermon. Well, it’s the wrong one. It’s a beautiful one and I hope you do read it, but the one I meant to bring to your attention was this one. I think it second only to St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal Sermon, which is high praise indeed, as Chrysostom's is perhaps the most joyous proclamation in all of human history. Well, this sermon should be treasured right alongside that one.

And it, together with a summer of wrestling with Rob Bell’s book Love Wins, has greatly simplified for me the issue of ones eternal destiny. Yes, it’s starkly simple: when we die, (perhaps just as we are dying), we shall finally see Jesus as He is. As He truly is, not as we may have heard Him preached. And He will say to each of us, “Come with Me into Paradise.” And those who love the One they see and above all else want (albeit quite suddenly) to be with Him forever, will be. Period. They may have believed a slew of wrong things. They may never have been baptized or ever heard of Christ. They may have committed almost nothing but evil deeds. They need have neither any goodness of their own nor any imputed goodness; they are all invited, for God’s love in absolutely unconditional.

Those who rejoice in this blanket amnesty rejoice in it forever; and whoever resents it, his very resentment excludes him from it.

In a way, I probably should end this post right here, because that really is all there is to it. But I know this position raises a lot of questions, such as: Well, if anyone will enter Paradise who wants to, what good is it to preach the Gospel, to spread Christianity? Or what good, to labor so hard all our lives to follow Christ’s path, to become pure and holy? But I think most of these questions are wrong-headed or rather, wrong-hearted. They remind us of all sorts of Parables, of the Prodigal’s elder brother, who resented his bother’s homecoming party, of the laborers in the vineyard who resented the latecomers being paid the same wage they were paid, who had worked all day long.

The value of being in communion with Christ in this life is that – imagine this! – we get to be in communion with Christ in this life! Being in communion with Christ is in itself already the highest value, is already Paradise in embryonic form. (What else did we expect Paradise to be? Are crowns, golden streets, or gates of pearl even comparable to Him?) If we are following Christ for any other reward, or for any other reason than for love of Him, we aren’t really doing it.

Note, too, that the more we become like Him, the deeper our communion with Him grows, so we struggle for it; or we may express the same thing by saying the more we grow, the greater our salvation; either way of putting it is a tautology.

Thart's all there is to it, and yet there is a furthermore, a danger inherent in not following Christ here and now. And that has to do with our passions. To the extent we are not living for Christ, we are being driven by our passions; that is, by our pride, lust, gluttony, greed, and the like. And when we are living for our passions, we immediately begin to fear God, because we are aware that His will and ours are opposites. Our deeds are evil, but our pleasure in them is great, even downright addictive, and we do not want God or anyone else interfering with them. Or judging them. Or judging us. And this fear of God very soon begets dislike, and dislike begets hatred. The danger, then, is that when we die and see Christ just as He is, He will be just as we feared He would be, the hated spoilsport, the Revealer of the Light Who by His very contrasting Presence, makes us keenly, consciously, inescapably aware of the evil in us; and when we hear Him summoning us to paradise, the danger is, we will refuse to go.

And Love, of course, will never force us.

“This is condemnation: that Light is come into the world and men preferred darkness, because their deeds were evil.” –Jesus Christ, to Nicodemos (John 3:19)

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comments:

That was really beautiful. You nailed it when you said, "The value of being in communion with Christ in this life is that – imagine this! – we get to be in communion with Christ in this life! Being in communion with Christ is in itself already the highest value, is already Paradise in embryonic form. (What else did we expect Paradise to be? Are crowns, golden streets, or gates of pearl even comparable to Him?) If we are following Christ for any other reward, or for any other reason than for love of Him, we aren’t really doing it."